The Leviathan’s Failureer

The liberal vision of America, as it ever more rapidly replaces the church and local community with the federal government as chief conveyor of charity and aid, is a leviathan that allegedly cares for all. From the leviathan, all will find comfort, health care and work. The leviathan will ensure “fair” wages. The leviathan will ensure your sex change operation is paid for. The leviathan will even ensure men have insurance to coverage their pregnancies.

All the leviathan asks of you is more money. It is always more money. When other people’s money runs out, the leviathan comes for you. The leviathan, however, always fails to deliver. While consuming ever-increasing resources, the leviathan fails to educate your children, fails to keep you safe, fails to deliver your mail on time, fails to fix your roads, and fails to deliver your healthcare.

The essence of conservatism is local control because conservatives realize the nature of humanity. Humans are sinners and it is always best to have as few sinners in charge as possible. That is only possible at the local level. Comfort, aid, and charity delivered at the local level is more efficiently administered and more accurately delivered than when the leviathan in the District of Columbia stretches out its tentacles into parts unknown.

Right now the leviathan is utterly failing at the left’s greatest scheme: universal health care. Obamacare exchanges around the nation are collapsing. While the poor have access to health care insurance, the lower end of the middle class has paid the price. In fact, the burden of Obamacare, perversely, has fallen on the lower middle class. It has not, however, spared the middle and upper end of the middle class spectrum. Insurance costs are up for all of them. The burdens of Obamacare are beginning to have a crushing effect on productivity and bottom lines.

Naturally, the left denies all these things. Like communists who claim communism would work if we just put the next round of true believer in charge of it, leftists in the United States are convinced if we only went even further to the left on healthcare the system would work. They will cite as evidence the withdrawal of private insurance companies from the Obamacare exchanges as proof we need a fully government run system.

This past week, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it was bailing out of exchanges in that state. Humana, Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare and other private insurances are walking away in various states. State run systems are in debt and the federal system is dysfunctional. According to the Wall Street Journal, premiums in just the state of Tennessee are up nearly 56 percent.

Tennessee is not alone. Other states are seeing ballooning costs as well. All of this was easily predictable and, in fact, organizations like the Heritage Foundation predicted these sorts of things would happen. Washington leftists, led by the Obama Administration, chose not to believe it would be so. Now, in the face of a looming collapse, they choose to pretend all is well.

Washington will never be able to provide a universal healthcare solution. The nation is too large and too heterogeneous. “But Great Britain!” exclaims the left. The United Kingdom is a nation spread out over 94,000 square miles consisting of 64 million people, 90 percent of whom are white with a common heritage. The United States’s 320 million people live across 3.8 million square miles that are vastly more diverse, vastly more spread out, with vastly less commonality. One size fits all systems do not work well in our republic.

Unfortunately for Americans who increasingly see Obamacare collapsing around them, the presidential nominees of both parties both favor universal, socialist, government run healthcare. Both of them cite Canada and the United Kingdom as models.

There are ways to fix the system. They require more flexibility, more competition, and more ownership of the problem by individual citizens. But neither party wants to do that when they can use the issue as a political weapon. Soon, however, they will have to act. The leviathan is running out of money and is hungry again.

To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.